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DevRel is often framed as the voice of the developer. My research suggests a broader job: gathering representative feedback, reducing friction, and showing developers what changed.

Of the 13 DevRel leaders I interviewed for my MBA dissertation, only two could clearly demonstrate a coherent link between tactical activity and organisational strategy. In this post, I talk through how focusing on the developer journey can help bridge that gap.

Academic research on brand communities can help DevRel, but only up to a point. The bigger lesson is where the model breaks: developer communities run on trust in the technology, not loyalty to the brand.

Two companies can have similarly capable DevRel teams doing similar work and still get different results. In my research, company type, lifecycle stage, and technology cycles kept shaping what DevRel could realistically do.

Education. Success. Marketing. Programs. These four pillars describe what Developer Relations teams do. But the more important question is what makes that work credible, useful, and trusted by developers.

Developer Experience isn't just central to DevRel strategy. It's both what your team depends on before it can succeed, and what it actively shapes through its work.

Developer Relations is sometimes equated to marketing. Incorporating insights from 13 interviews, I explain why DevRel is better understood as value co-creation.

The question of how Developer Relations (DevRel) teams create value has been answered plenty of times (though rarely through systematic research). In 2024 I looked into it properly through 13 interviews with DevRel leaders, culminating in an MBA dissertation at Warwick Business School, unearthing a couple of surprises along the way. This series works through what I found.

Chris Reddington demonstrates "Flight School," a custom Next.js application built to personalize his learning journey using the GitHub Copilot SDK. See how he leverages agentic workflows to generate daily coding challenges based on his GitHub profile, evaluate solutions against test cases, and automatically export projects to new repositories.

Join us for Rubber Duck Thursdays! A lighthearted and informal stream where we live code on some projects. This week we explore how to bring the power of GitHub Copilot into your apps with the GitHub Copilot SDK, building hands-on examples and discussing patterns for integrating AI-powered coding assistance directly into developer tools and workflows.